Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - Japan

This new study approaches the martial arts from their origins in military exercises and callisthenics. It examines a rich folklore from old wuxia tales of crime-fighting heroes to modern kung fu movies. Centre stage is given to the stories that martial artists tell themselves about...

From before the dawn of recorded history, there has been a rich flow of interaction between Japan and China. Japan has long learned many things from Chinese civilization, and since the modern era China began to learn from Japan. In the 21st century, however, China surpassed Japan in terms to become the world s second largest economy. Amid this rapid rise of China and what has been called a power-shift in Japan-China relations, there are signs that bilateral tensions are rising and that the image each country has of the other is worsening.

This volume provides a cogent analysis of...

With over 5,200 entries, this volume remains one of the most extensive annotated bibliographies on the USA's fight against Japan in the Second World War. Including books, articles, and de-classified documents up to the end of 1987, the book is organized into six categories: Part 1 presents reference works, including encyclopedias, pictorial accounts, military histories, East Asian histories, hisotoriographies. Part 2: Diplomatic-political aspects of the war against Japan Part 3 contains sources on the economic and legal aspects of the war against Japan. Part 4 presents sources on the...

The Allied occupation of Japan is remembered as the -good occupation.- An American-led coalition successfully turned a militaristic enemy into a stable and democratic ally. Of course, the story was more complicated, but the occupation did forge one of the most enduring relationships in the postwar world. Recent events, from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to protests over American bases in Japan to increasingly aggressive territorial disputes between Asian nations over islands in the Pacific, have brought attention back to the subject of the occupation of Japan.

In...

During the six-and-a-half-year occupation of Japan (1945 1952), U.S. film studios in close coordination with Douglas MacArthur's Supreme Command for the Allied Powers launched an ambitious campaign to extend their power and influence in a historically rich but challenging film market. In this far-reaching "enlightenment campaign," Hollywood studios disseminated more than six hundred films to theaters, earned significant profits, and showcased the American way of life as a political, social, and cultural model for the war-shattered Japanese population.

In Screening...

Buddhists around the world celebrate the benefits of worshipping Kannon (Avalokitesvara), a compassionate savior who is one of the most beloved in the Buddhist pantheon. When Kannon appears in multiple manifestations, the deity's powers are believed to increase to even greater heights. This concept generated several cults throughout history: among the most significant is the cult of the Six Kannon, which began in Japan in the tenth century and remained prominent through the sixteenth century. In this ambitious work, Sherry Fowler examines the development of the Japanese Six Kannon cult,...

Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan is a wide-ranging account of how women writers have made sense (and nonsense) of pregnancy in postwar Japan. While earlier authors such as Yosano Akiko had addressed the pain and emotional complexities of childbearing in their poetry and prose, the topic quickly moved into the literary shadows when motherhood became enshrined as a duty to state and sovereign in the 1930s and '40s. This reproductive imperative endured after World War II, spurred by a need to create a new generation of citizens and consumers for a new, peacetime nation. It was only in...

When he died from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one, Kajii Motojiro had written only twenty short stories. Yet his life and work, it is argued here, sheds light on a significant moment in Japanese history and, ultimately, adds to our understanding of how modern Japanese identity developed. By the time Kajii began to write in the mid-1920s there was heated debate among his peers over "legitimate" forms of literary expression: Japanese Romantics questioned the value of a western-inspired version of modernity; others were influenced by Marxist proletarian literature or modernist...

The 1937 Rape of Nanjing has become a symbol of Japanese violence during the Second World War, but it was not the only event during which the Japanese used extreme force. This thought-provoking book analyzes Japan's actions during the war, without blaming Japan, helping readers understand what led to those eruptions. In fact, the author specifically disputes the idea that the forms of extreme violence used in the Pacific War were particularly Japanese.

The volume starts by examining the Rape of Nanjing, then goes on to address Japan's acts of individual and collective violence...

Sao Paulo, Brazil, holds the largest number of Japanese descendants outside Japan, and they have been there for six generations. Japanese immigration to Brazil started in 1908 to replace European immigrants to work in Sao Paulo's expanding coffee industry. It peaked in the late 1920s and early 1930s as anti-Japanese sentiment grew in Brazil. Approximately 189,000 Japanese entered Brazil by 1942 in mandatory family units. After the war, prewar immigrants and their descendants became quickly concentrated in Sao Paulo City. Immigration from Japan resumed in 1952, and by 1993 some 54,000...